Four Bathers (Quatre baigneuses)

Four Bathers of 1876 belongs to the earliest phase of what would become Cézanne's most ambitious and sustained project: the large multi-figure Bathers compositions. By the mid-1870s he had already begun to move away from the Impressionist circle's interest in capturing transient light effects, and the nude bather in a landscape was the subject through which he was working out an alternative approach — one that would reconcile the figure painting tradition of the museums with the formal experimentation of the avant-garde. The four-figure arrangement was less common in his bather series than the three- or five-figure groupings, and the compositional challenges it posed were specific: distributing four masses evenly across the picture plane without creating a procession or a symmetrical pair of pairs. His contemporaries Renoir and Monet had no interest in this kind of formal problem-solving; Renoir's bathers remained sensuous and Impressionistically handled well into the 1880s, while Monet had abandoned the figure entirely. The Barnes Foundation's extraordinary concentration of bather canvases from across Cézanne's career was central to Albert Barnes's conviction that Cézanne's method of constructing form through color planes was the foundational achievement of modern art.

The four figures are arranged in a horizontal band across the foreground of a shallow landscape setting, their grouping more evenly distributed across the canvas width than the pyramidal arrangements of some companion works. The paint handling at this date shows the intersection of Impressionist spontaneity with Cézanne's developing interest in structural density.